Reading - Part 5

White Storks Back in Britain After Hundreds of Years

These beautiful birds could be about to become a feature of the British landscape again. The last definitive record of a pair of white storks (a very tall bird) successfully breeding in Britain was in 1416, from a nest on St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. No one knows why storks disappeared from our shores. They often featured on the menus of medieval banquets so we might, quite simply, have consumed them all. But there could be a more ominous reason. Storks are migrants arriving after the end of Winter, nesting on rooftops and happily associating with humans, and because of this, they have long been a symbol of hope and new life. Yet their association with rebirth also meant they became a symbol of rebellion. Shortly after the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, while storks were rare but surviving, parliament debated putting greater effort into destroying them entirely for fear they might inspire republicanism. Today, fortunately, that notion has disappeared and the stork retains its association with new life, appearing on cards given to celebrate the arrival of a new child, as a bird carrying a baby in a sling held in its beak.

So, after such a long absence, there was great excitement when in April of this year a pair of white storks built an untidy nest of sticks in the top branches of a huge oak in the middle of our rewilding project at Knepp Estate in West Sussex. Drone footage, taken before the pair started sitting on them, showed three large eggs. The fact that they were infertile and did not hatch was not too disappointing. The pair are only four years old, and storks can live to over thirty, with their first attempts to breed often failing.

Prospects for next year are encouraging. These young storks are part of a project to return the species to Britain, inspired by reintroductions in European countries that more than three hundred have reached their target. Imported from Poland, they have spent the best part of three years in a six-acre pen with a group of other juveniles and several injured, non-flying adults, also from Poland. Other birds have already shown strong loyalty to the site. Two years ago, a young bird from Knepp flew across the Channel to France and, this summer, returned to its companions.

In the face of reports of unrelenting ecological loss (the UN estimates a million species are on the brink of extinction globally), the white stork's return is refreshing news. As tens of thousands of people demonstrate about the growing climate crisis and ecoanxiety besets us, these glimpses of restoration are important. Featuring the storks in BBC television's Springwatch in June, the ecologist Chris Packham described the project as "imaginative, intelligent, progressive and practical".

And yet its path to restoration in the UK has not been smooth. Support from conservation bodies has been surprisingly difficult to obtain; some were hard-pressed with their own initiatives, while others were simply reluctant to stick their necks out. In addition, the committee of the Sussex Wildlife Trust raised doubts about the stork ever having been a British bird. They also had concerns that English-bred birds would migrate across the Channel, and feared that their messy nests and closeness to humans would cause a hazard – rubbish falling down people’s chimneys.